I have experienced a moment during a workout or a ride when everything feels slightly off in a way that’s hard to define.
The legs are there. The lungs are filling and emptying. But the quality of the effort has changed. I’d trained hard for decades. I knew my body well. So I did what most weekend warriors do when something feels different: I pushed harder.
That was the mistake.
Not the only one, as it turned out. I was making several of them — quietly and consistently, while calling it training.
The body after 60 doesn’t announce when your approach has stopped working. It just ages faster than it should, while you keep showing up, wondering why the results aren’t what they used to be.
I came across a piece in Men’s Health recently that followed three athletes into their later decades — an NBA icon who rebuilt his body around mechanics, a 57-year-old trainer who has never stopped competing, and an 82-year-old triathlete with ten world championship wins who is still racing internationally. What they had in common wasn’t talent or genetics. It was that they had identified and eliminated the specific mistakes that accelerate decline.
Here are the five most common ones. Check how many you’re making right now.
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Mistake 1 — You’re still training as you did at 35.
This is the most common mistake, and the most invisible, because it feels like discipline.
High intensity. Volume is the primary lever. Fast recovery is assumed rather than planned. These approaches sometimes worked at 40. They are now actively working against you because the body after 60 has fundamentally different recovery requirements, different responses to load, and a different relationship with intensity. What used to produce adaptations now produces breakdowns.
Longevity physician Peter Attia has described the shift required as moving from training for performance to training for longevity — a recalibration that most athletes resist until something forces the issue. The athletes who age best make this shift deliberately, before injury demands it.
Adapting is not conceding. It is the intelligent response to accurate information about what your body needs now, in your 60s and beyond.
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Mistake 2 — You’re doing the hero workout.
The 82-year-old triathlete Robert Plant — ten world championship wins, still racing internationally — takes one day off per week, whether he feels good or not. “If I don’t,” he says, “by Wednesday I’ll wish I had.”
That discipline in reverse — the willingness to hold back — is what most athletes over 60 are missing.
The hero workout is the session you push too hard because you feel good that morning. It feels like progress. In fact, it is the single most common trigger for the injury that sidelines you for a week, undoing the three weeks of consistent work that preceded it. Research consistently shows that the best predictor of injury in older adults is a prior similar injury. The hero workout is how that cycle starts and repeats.
The enemy of durability at this age isn’t laziness. It’s the session that costs you the next three sessions.
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Mistake 3 — You’re skipping power work entirely.
Most over 60 train for strength. Almost none train for power — the ability to move not only forcefully but also quickly. That distinction is costing them more than they realize.
Power declines faster than strength with age. It also deteriorates more quickly without specific training. And it is the quality most directly linked to the outcomes that matter most in this age group: fall prevention, reaction speed, and the physical capacity to handle the unexpected demands of daily life.
The SPAF study, which tracked 427 people for 47 years, found that muscle power peaked at 27 in men and 19 in women — and that without specific training it declines at an accelerating rate through the sixties. Most people never train it at all after 40, which means they are losing the quality they can least afford to lose without even noticing.
Five minutes after your warm-up, before your strength work: a jump, a medicine ball throw, and a fast bodyweight squat. Low volume, high intensity. That’s all it takes to provide the stimulus.
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Mistake 4 — You’re ignoring the foundation.
One of the athletes in the Men’s Health piece spent years being strong in ways that were quietly damaging him. His movement patterns were compensating for misalignment, which was unevenly wearing down his joints. He wasn’t in pain. He was performing well by every conventional measure. And he was accelerating the wear on his body with every session.
The fix required going back to the foundation. Not adding load. Addressing how he moved before adding any load.
Mechanics first. Strength second.
For most people over 60 who have trained for decades, this is the hardest principle to accept because it requires checking the ego at the door. A session focused on ankle mobility and hip alignment doesn’t feel like training. It doesn’t deliver the satisfaction of a heavy deadlift day. However, it is the prerequisite for a heavy deadlift day to be safe and sustainable for the next decade.
The boring work is the most important. That’s not a comfortable thing to hear after thirty years of hard training. It’s also true.
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Mistake 5 — You’re training alone.
This one doesn’t feel like a training mistake. It feels like a lifestyle choice. But the research on social isolation as a physical health risk is sufficiently unambiguous to merit inclusion on this list. In fact, Loneliness among people in their 60s and 70s will be the subject of a future piece on The Long Ride.
The US Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness found that social isolation poses a health risk equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. For men over 65, the data is stark: this group is most likely to lose their social network after retirement and least likely to rebuild it.
The consequences aren’t just psychological. Chronic loneliness elevates cortisol, impairs immune function, accelerates cognitive decline, and measurably increases cardiovascular risk.
Shared physical effort is one of the most effective antidotes available. A cycling group, a masters swim programme, a hiking club. The body benefits from the training. The nervous system benefits from social connections. The two aren’t separate. They compound.
Training alone is a choice. It is also, for many people in this age group, a mistake they don’t know they’re making.
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The word durability came up in the Men’s Health piece, and it’s the right word for what all five of these mistakes erode. Not fitness — that’s a snapshot. Durability is a trajectory. It’s the capacity to keep performing, to keep moving, to keep showing up — not just this month but five years from now and ten years after that.
The athletes who age best don’t have exceptional genetics. They have identified what is quietly working against them and stopped doing it. The mistakes above are common. They feel like the right moves. Most people making them are calling them progress.
Check your list. Adjust. The body after 60 is not finished. It is different. And different requires a different approach.
As always, consult your physician or a qualified trainer before changing your training programme, particularly if you are managing existing conditions or returning from injury.
Research & sources referenced in this piece
Heffernan, A. (2026). “The Art & Science of Durability.” Men’s Health, Spring 2026.
Attia, P. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity (2023). Harmony Books.
Westerståhl, M. et al. (2025). Rise and Fall of Physical Capacity in a General Population: A 47-Year Longitudinal Study. Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle.
US Surgeon General (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. HHS.gov.
That point about the body after 60 not announcing when the old approach has stopped working is excellent. The hard move for lifelong athletes is accepting that adaptation still requires intensity, but the dosage, recovery, and feedback loops have to get smarter.